Gngr: A New Web Browser Focused On Privacy

[Delgarde]

Some pages uses only js for rendering pages - fancy client side framework fetches data from site api.

Yeah... most web developers don't regard "no javascript" as a real-world scenario anymore... the number of people who browse with Javascript disabled is statistically insignificant, so they neither design nor test for how well their page handles fallback.

[stqn]

Indeed disabling JS or cookies (or to a lesser degree the referrer) is a nice recipe to break most web sites. Some will still work (phoronix works without JS!) but only a few? So I don?t see how disabling JS and cookies by default is gonna help anyone.

What would be actually useful is deleting cookies at exit, selectively enabling JS, limiting browser fingerprinting?

But yeah anyway, java, ugh.

[Delgarde]

What would be actually useful is deleting cookies at exit, selectively enabling JS, limiting browser fingerprinting?

Deleting cookies at exit is doable under Firefox already... and with the right add-ons, you can more easily control whether it accepts the cookies at all for a given site. I do on my home machine - no cookies are accepted unless I either white-list the site or temporarily turn off blocking via a toolbar button, and all cookies are discarded when the browser closes.

[Guest]

Yeah... most web developers don't regard "no javascript" as a real-world scenario anymore... the number of people who browse with Javascript disabled is statistically insignificant, so they neither design nor test for how well their page handles fallback.

I had installed no-script on my firefox for years and I uninstalled it last week and installed adblock. I use chrome for my daily surfing, but firefox is my browser for work and it became almost unusable these days with no script. Yes - you can alway unblock scripts, but today with multiple cdn's assets per site it's really hard to unblock the right things.

[KellyClowers]

"Gngr"? Does this have something to do with "The Eye of Argon"?

[mark45]

And the crown of stupidity goes to.. the devs of Gngr!

Edit: Not only developing a *new* browser is utterly stupid (unless you're a big corp with lots of devs and money), but they actually disable JS and whatnot by default. Wow. It's like going to a job interview not just dirty in mud but in actual raw stinking shit.

[schmidtbag]

Isn't it "NaCl"...? When read in Spanish, be the last letter a lowercase "l" or a capital "I", it sounds like "nazi".

Ya I'm pretty sure it is NaCl (lowercase L). For those of you who don't know, NaCl is regular table salt (sodium chloride).


Anyway more on focus - anybody think it's a little ironic to make a browser focused on security that is based on Java? I'm not sure I really see the appeal to this browser - I figure there are easier ways to secure yourself with already existing browsers. I don't really see this browser being all that popular but at least it'll help shut up people who whine all the time about being spied on or having their passwords stored in plain text.

[mark45]

Anyway more on focus - anybody think it's a little ironic to make a browser focused on security that is based on Java?

Not only that, Java itself makes it far more complicated to create a competitive sophisticated desktop app because Java has never been good at what startup speed (and speed in general except some exceptions), memory usage and whatnot. It's a hog. And the VM is so complicated that sometimes the VM crashes bringing down your app, so you have an extra layer of problems with Java. Another layer is that Java apps are compiled at runtime so each time you execute the app the CPU spends extra cycles to compile the stuff, while with C++ it's only compiled once. This and the sophisticated VM make up for the notorious Java hiccups which are a PITA for Android devs who often decide to write C++ code instead.

[Jabberwocky]

Why don't they just use telnet? I thought of this as a joke, but it probably will work beter than their browser.

I mostly use chromium-browser with multiple browser profiles and replaced default search engine with duckduckgo.com.

I would like to go a step further and deny any connections to domains that I am not currently on, or at least have some sort of confirmation box that asks me if I want to allow connections individually when it tries to connect to domains that I am not on at the moment (very useful for sites with credit card payments). If I can do that I will not need to use multiple browser profiles.

[kaprikawn]

Sometimes it astounds me that these people are clever enough to write a browser, but too dumb to realise that this is a worthless endeavour. Reconciling these facts is quite the exercise in double-think.